Too Late the Hero (1970)

May 21, 1970

Too Late the Hero,' Film of War in Pacific, Opens

By ROGER GREENSPUN

Published: May 21, 1970

An island patrol for which only the captain has volunteered; the captain, a sentimental trigger-happy bungler; the men, cowardly and incompetent; the mission, a farfetched intelligence stunt; the only reasonable aim, personal survival—these are some of the elements that raise Robert Aldrich's World War II Pacific Theater melodrama, "Too Late the Hero," to the level of knowledgeable late-1960's cliché.

Although committed to the notion that war is an inclusive system of betrayals, the film subverts that notion and settles instead for some fashionable ironies and remarkably conventional jungle warfare displays.

Aldrich handles his relationships with enough intelligence, and he exploits his genre with enough theatrical good sense, to make "Too Late the Hero" often seem about to become a more interesting movie than it finally reveals itself to be. The cast is wholly professional (Cliff Robertson, especially, as the malingering American naval officer who is too late the hero), the locations are and the gore seems authentic, but the action is, in time, so thoroughly undercut as to render it meaningless not only to war but also as art.

In what looks like a brilliant stroke of cruelty, Aldrich has set his British base camp at one edge of a large cleared field across which returning patrols must run under the fire of Japanese rifles and machine guns from the brush on either side.

The whole thing might be a suicidal track meet out of Kafka, except that a few soliders do, improbably, get through. But when this clever device, carefully introduced near the beginning, is put to its climatic use at the end, its force has been exhausted—even as metaphor. And as movie image, it signals a reversion to annihilation fantasies that it has been the whole mipulse of the movie to deplore.